What if we re-imagined Rockford?

Saturday

Jul 5, 2014 at 9:00 AM

This holiday weekend we’re having a little fun, asking: What if some of the most sensational projects pitched for Rockford over the past two decades had come to fruition?A visitors brochure might look something like the illustration above. A postcard home might read like this:I stayed at a cool downtown hotel in what used to be a knitting factory. It’s right next to the river, and they have a whitewater rafting course! And I went to the museum that has all these guitars from a guy in a band called Cheap Trick. Then we went to the aquarium and zoo. Next time, we hope to stop at the clown museum or hit the carousel park.What if...

By Kevin HaasRockford Register Star

ROCKFORD — The 77-year-old art deco building on the west bank of the Rock River has seen better days. Much better.

Vacant for 15 years, the historic 80,000-square-foot structure has lost a couple of its windows, replaced by plywood boards. A crumbling concrete staircase was under repair this week. A peek inside reveals paint peeling off the ceilings and a hodgepodge of scattered items.

Still, for whatever reason, the old National Guard Armory on North Main Street is often the site of big dreams.

Year after year, the city-owned building is imagined as a potential home for new and exciting entertainment options. Should it be an aquarium or clown museum? How about an IMAX theater next door? Those were a few of the options proposed for the building in the past decade and a half.

Rockford is not short on coulda-woulda-shoulda projects. There’s Northern Illinois University, which went to DeKalb. And Interstate 90 going around the city rather than through it.

Tourism czar John Groh points out that the city has far more exciting attractions to celebrate in the past two decades than it does missed opportunities to lament. Among them: the openings of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Laurent House, Rocky Glen OHV park, Lensing Historic Auto Museum in Roscoe, CoCo Key indoor water park, Nicholas Conservatory and Sinnissippi Park, City Market and RiverHawks Stadium (which was renamed Aviators Stadium last year).

There have been upgrades at the Coronado, the BMO Harris Bank Center and the Jeanie Gang-designed Bengt Sjostrom Theater at Rock Valley College. And, of course, we should mention the expansions of Anderson Japanese Gardens, Burpee Museum and Discovery Center.

Projects underway, spearheaded by the Rockford Park District, include expansions at Sportscore Two, the West Rock Wake Park and Alpine Hills Adventure Park developments, and the $21 million redevelopment of the Ingersoll building downtown into a riverfront sports complex.

“We have a very healthy, diverse mix of attractions that many other communities don’t have,” said Groh, CEO of the Rockford Area Convention & Visitors Bureau.

Vetting the ideas

Many ideas are ultimately abandoned for strategic reasons. Consider the proposed IMAX theater near the armory. An analysis showed a movement away from IMAX technology as it existed, Groh said. It was a wise decision to abandon the idea because the IMAX in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which Rockford had used for comparison, has since closed.

“The community is, I think, really good at vetting good ideas and moving them forward through a systematic process that looks at the market, looks at the likelihood of success, and then moves on projects that have a high possibility of success,” he said. “When they don’t, we don’t.”

In the past 20 years, as empty buildings have become more common, so have ideas for turning them from eyesores to attractions.

The skeletal remains of former manufacturing giants on the southwest side are often seen as key components to revitalization.

The ideas have come in many forms, from turning the old Nelson Knitting Co. factory, where iconic red-heel socks were made, into an industrial heritage museum to the plethora of ideas pitched for the empty brick buildings that cover the 26-acre Barber-Colman manufacturing site, which used to be the Reed-Chatwood complex.

The latter property was vacated in 2001 and bought by the city in 2002. Some saw a national firefighters museum as the right fit. It was also envisioned as a home for an education campus dubbed the “Center of Excellence,” which would aim to bring Rock Valley College, NIU and Rockford College together in one spot.

A different idea was relocating the Illinois Employment and Training Center to one of the Barber-Colman buildings.

None of the ideas were realized.

‘Take a chance’

The same could be said for dozens of proposals that didn’t rely on disregarded factories — a zoo in Cherry Valley, a riverboat casino, an auto racing track near Chicago Rockford International Airport and a whitewater park south of Fordam Dam.

“I saw a glaring need for some excitement in this town,” said David “Buzz” Carlson, a retired fire-protection engineer from Rockford who pitched the idea for the firefighters museum in 2006.

Carlson said bureaucracy and City Hall stood in the way. Sen. Dave Syverson, R-Rockford, an early supporter, said high costs and competition from similar museums in the Midwest sank the idea.

“I don’t want to be totally negative because I do know some people have made a concerted effort and their are some glimmers of life downtown,” Carlson said. “But I always thought, boy, we need to take a chance on something really big.”

The litany of unrealized proposals may have turned some Rockfordians sour to pie-in-the-sky plans. Calls were made — including some from the Register Star’s Editorial Board — to demolish the Amerock building because it was deemed unsavable. Historic status stopped the demolition.

Years later, historic tax credits and foreign investment programs have made the building part of a new optimism for redevelopment. Wisconsin-based Gorman & Co. has a $52 million plan to turn it into a hotel and convention center.

The state historic tax credit legislation that was passed with the city’s support “has really allowed a lot of the condo development you’re seeing with Urban Equities. It’s allowed Amerock to have a chance at redevelopment, and the same goes for Barber-Colman,” City Administrator Jim Ryan said.

The competition

The city has worked to attract developers to the armory and Barber-Colman, Ryan said. It recently made an under-the-radar pitch to bring a beer manufacturer to Barber-Colman, something Ryan admitted is a long shot because the company preferred a location on the East Coast.

It’s also been working with Belmont Sayre, a North Carolina-based company that specializes in urban redevelopment, on development concepts. That includes a potential education center, he said. The armory is considered a possible site for the Rockford Public Library if it is forced to move from its main branch downtown during environmental cleanup.

“Those sites still need to compete with the I-90 sites and airport sites,” Ryan said. “It’s really got to be a unique developer that sees the interest.”

Ryan said the city’s work to fix the Morgan Street bridge and the state’s reconstruction of South Main Street should help entice development on the southwest side.

“It’s really making all those public investments so that private investment looks at it and says, ‘Hey, this is an area that’s coming back’.”